Glasgow Riverside Museum of Transport glazing aesthetics
21st August 2012

The creative scope of glass in pioneering modern architecture is perfectly illustrated in the stunning Glasgow Riverside Museum of Transport, in which GLASSOLUTIONS played a key role.

The £74million museum designed by Zaha Hadid – who designed Stirling Prize for Architecture winning buildings in both 2010 and 2011 – has already been dubbed 'Glasgow's Guggenheim' and lies at the heart of an extensive redevelopment of 120 acres of the city’s riverside. Funded by Glasgow City Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund, the new museum replaces the Kelvin Hall Museum of Transport with a location to better reflect the city’s rich seafaring and shipbuilding heritage.

Zaha Hadid’s conception was a ‘flowing’ building which acts like a tunnel connecting the city and the river, open at two ends of a sectional, column-free extrusion. At the structure’s end-point with its eye-catching ‘zig-zagging’ zinc roof shape is a café and corporate entertainment centre with superb views for visitors over the point where the rivers Kelvin Clyde meet.

The main building houses more than 3,000 objects on display, from skateboards to locomotives, paintings to prams, and velocipedes to voiturettes. These occupy a large circulation space which is up to 50m wide and split over two floors. Moored outside is the 19th-century sailing ship, Glasgow's Tall Ship, the Glenlee.